There may be no accounting for taste. But there are accountants to taste-makers, and
Tom Lowenstein
does the books for more of them than anyone. About 3000 painters, sculptors, writers, journalists, actors, models, filmmakers and musicians are on the books at Lowenstein’s accounting practice.

He knows many of Australia’s top artists very well – and their financial affairs even better. Yes, most artists struggle to survive and, yes, many are terrible with money. “We have had some difficult situations with clients’ ex-wives, with creditors; it’s quite a wild industry," says Lowenstein, an adroit conversationalist who knows how to tantalise while never breaching a confidence.

He’s good at lunch; it was lunching that drove him to seek out artists, instead of the more vanilla fare of small businesses, as ­clients. In so doing, he established a reputation as one of Australia’s pre-eminent advocates for the arts, especially over matters when art meets money. “When you sit and have a conversation with [artist
John] Olsen
you talk about so many different things. One thing that drove me to a decision to focus on working for artists was the number of times I would go to lunch with normal clients and the discussion would be centred about shares and the latest on the tax department’s attitude to things. When you talk to artists you discuss the more important things in life. Money isn’t the critical thing."

When
Jeremy Cooper
, as chairman of the federal government’s superannuation system review in 2010, suggested rules to make it more or less impossible for self-managed super funds to invest in art or the other nice things in life – jewellery, vintage cars, yachts, race horses, wine – it was Lowenstein who led the counterattack.

He lost, and the rules that stop people from displaying the art they’ve invested in will be fully phased in by 2016. Lowenstein is still manning the barricades, though, and has been lobbying away in Canberra.

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He has good reasons to keep fighting. First, he can see how the income of many of his ­clients has dropped as a result of the super crackdown. Second, his own super fund is stashed with fabulous art, a section of which has just been collected into a handsome book.

Artwork as fees payment

Accounting for Taste; The Lowensteins Art Management Collection reproduces 260 works from a collection of 300 to 400 items – Lowenstein himself doesn’t know the exact number. Some have been bought, but Lowenstein sometimes accepts an artwork as payment for his fees. There are works by
Charles Blackman
,
Arthur Boyd
,
Bill Henson
,
Robert Klippel
,
Margaret Olley
,
Ben Quilty
,
Sally Smart
,
Imants Tillers
,
Aida Tomescu
and
Brett Whiteley
.

“We don’t offer this to every artist; we usually offer this kind of arrangement to younger or struggling artists. Fortunately we had the situation in the 1970s when Charles Blackman and John Olsen and
Tim Storrier
were all having difficulties," he says with a laugh.

Our menus arrive. With an eye to a good deal Lowenstein has suggested Di Stasio, the legendary stayer of Fitzroy Street in ­Melbourne’s St Kilda. Fitzroy Street is a palimpsest of St Kilda itself; at least one restaurant, bakery or sex-shop seems to have been deposited by every boom and bust this iconic suburb has ridden since World War II.

Two-hatted Di Stasio represents the time when St Kilda was chic in the 1980s and its $35 prix fixe lunch keeps customers coming. I choose the potato soup and chicken for main, Lowenstein orders the calamari salad and lamb. It comes with a glass of wine and we opt for the merlot, which we agree is passable.

“Where would you like to start?" he says, once the menus are taken away. “Would you like to start from when my accounting firm began working for artists or would you rather I start from the beginning?"

“We can start in Czechoslovakia if you like," I reply. In the introduction to his book, penned by art historian
Sasha Grishin
, there is a passing mention of Lowenstein’s birthplace in Czechoslovakia and his ­family’s internment in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II.

It is as intriguing as it is brief.

Once was league before ballet

“No, I want to start here in Australia," he replies, smiling: how an accountant with a little practice in Melbourne became a leading figure in the Australian arts scene. His French-born wife Sylvia got him interested in painting after they married in Melbourne in 1960. His interest in art arrived slowly; an early matrimonial fight was provoked when he opted to see Richmond and Carlton play the grand final rather than Margot Fonteyn pirouette with Rudolf Nureyev.

But by 1972, when they took their first ­holiday to Europe together, Lowenstein was happily visiting art galleries and was struck by the quality of etchings and lithographs of paintings, techniques rarely used in Australia. When they got home to Melbourne, the couple sourced limited edition prints of paintings by
Arthur Boyd
,
Sidney Nolan
,
Fred Williams
, John Olsen and Brett Whiteley. With another couple, they opened a commercial gallery of prints in what is now the Readings Bookshop in St Kilda’s Acland Street. It never made a profit. “When you get excited over a project, common sense often goes out the window," he says now.

But it did introduce him to artists, including Olsen. The two were having lunch when the artist revealed he hadn’t lodged a tax return for years. Lowenstein offered to fix up his tax affairs. Shortly after, a book of Olsen’s works was published and a small passage, in which he talked of needing “an accountant like Tom Lowenstein" appeared in a newspaper review. In the next few weeks, Lowenstein received dozens of phone calls from artists asking if he would take care of their affairs as well.

And Lowenstein strikes you as the kind of creatively minded tax accountant that a ­creative type would want. Early on, his claims on behalf of his artist clients for a deduction for their overseas travel would be routinely rejected. Lowenstein pushed back, arguing that artists were different from other professions who couldn’t claim overseas travel as a deduction. He eventually sent off a letter to the Tax Office under the letterhead of the “Painters and Sculptors Association" – an entity he had just made up.

“The first time I wrote to them under that letterhead I was asked to come to Canberra to talk to the assistant commissioner and the reception we got was extremely cordial and very helpful and within a matter of weeks we were advised that artists do have different needs and as a result we no longer had much difficulty in proving things like overseas travel," he said.

And it’s not just the Tax Office; he advises many on how to think about their careers and on how to get a better deal from the ­galleries who represent them.

Commitment to the arts

“We’ve made a commitment to the arts and we do a lot of accounts for young artists and other crafts people, which is not really financially viable. [But] it’s not a case of whether you’re making money on this or not. What we’re hoping is out of these young artists we’re going to develop a few Ben Quiltys and a few top-class artists whose incomes in the end will warrant it."

Quilty is another of his clients and is also on the board of the Australian Artists Association, the successor to Lowenstein’s Painters and Sculptors Association.

Midway through our meal a change in topic is in order. Does Lowenstein ever talk about his childhood in Czechoslovakia? “How can I put it?" he replies. “It’s a period of my life I would like to suppress. Certain things I can’t even watch. For example, trains taking people off into the distance does something to me." After a long pause he takes another mouthful of food. We talk about the varying degree of interest his two sons, now 50 and 42, have in the war. Our plates are cleared away and I suggest the trauma of his early life must have been formative. He won’t talk about life in Bergen-Belsen, but he opens up to reveal the extraordinary story of how his family escaped the Holocaust.

The family had been living in a small Czech village when in 1944 the Germans started rounding up the Jews for the ghetto. His mother contacted her brother, a driver for the Swedish consul in Budapest. The consul arranged for another person – deploying the brother would have been too risky – to pick up Lowenstein’s mother and sister and drive them to safety in the consul’s home. Low­enstein was picked up by the consul’s secretary and smuggled into Hungary on a train, pretending to be her child. The family lived in Budapest for two months until a local ­Jewish community head, Rudolf Kastner, did a deal with Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the deportations, to allow 1600 Jews to escape to Palestine in exchange for cash and gold to buy trucks and ammunition.

The Lowenstein family boarded the train but instead of going west, at the Hungarian-Austrian border, it went east. Eventually, they disembarked at the Bergen-Belsen camp and managed to survive for six months until the advance by the Russians prompted the Germans to free the remaining prisoners and send them to Switzerland. “They felt this would be a nice goodwill gesture to show that they weren’t killing us all off.

“In Bergen-Belsen, we were surrounded by barbed wire and there were camps alongside ours and they kept changing the inmates. And we managed to survive.

Understanding of illegal migration

“It’s had an impact, sure," Lowenstein says in eventual response to my question. “It’s meant I have a better understanding about illegal migration, about boat people. It’s a different type of reaction to many others. Yes, it’s not fair that other people have to wait, that you’ve jumped to the front of the queue. But in desperation, what do you do?"

In the book’s introduction, Grishin writes that “an amateur shrink could speculate that Lowenstein himself was a frustrated artist, whose quick mind for figures and migrant experience plunged him into a business at which he excelled but which did little to ­satisfy his intellect and spiritual needs."

Lowenstein rules out any suggestion he is a frustrated artist. “I failed art at every level in school. In fact, I even failed when I borrowed someone else’s work. The art teacher said, ‘Lowenstein, you didn’t do that’."

So he’s not a frustrated creative type, but a successful creative accountant. His clients are all the richer, or less impoverished, for it. Finishing, he gives me a card: “If you need advice don’t hesitate to get in touch."